- A widely circulated video that purports to show Venezuelans celebrating the ouster of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro appears to be an AI-generated hoax. In other related news, the BBC has ordered its journalists not to use the word "kidnapped" when talking about Maduro's abduction. They can say "seized" or, when quoting US sources, "captured", but I guess they're afraid of not sounding impartial enough or something.
- The Pentagon is moving to cut the military retirement pay of former US Navy captain (and current senator) Mark Kelly. Pete Hegseth justified the move on the grounds that Kelly's reminder to active servicepeople that they have the right to refuse illegal orders constitutes "reckless misconduct".
- Federal NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis says that he wants to implement a "Green New Deal". The plan is ambitious, to say the least - a complete ban on new fossil fuel projects (not that his opponents won't still claim he wants to forcibly shut down all existing ones) and creating large numbers of new high quality manufacturing jobs making renewable energy infrastructure, electric buses, trucks, and farm equipment, and the like. He probably won't become prime minister, of course, but I kind of doubt any of the other candidates in the race will be either. Certainly someone has to keep banging the climate gong to the masses, and Lewis is better qualified than most to do so.
- The push to force workers back into the office continues apace. Naturally, the employers justify this partly on the grounds of productivity (despite the fact that some studies suggest the opposite); CTV didn't cite those studies, though, they just quoted a couple of civil servants who "think" that you're more productive in the office, while quoting a human resources professor claiming otherwise. To be fair, the proponents of the return to office gave other reasons as well (vague platitudes about "collaboration" and "organizational culture" as well as some hand-wringing about downtown businesses), but there was no mention of the idea that the valuation of commercial real estate could be a factor. In the case of public sector employers, there's also straight up populism - a sizeable chunk of the electorate consists of people who can't work remotely due to the nature of their jobs - and they think it's "unfair" that others are able to, and vote for rightwing populists like Doug Ford. This resentment is shortsighed, of course - if more people worked from home, the people who can't would face much less traffic on their commutes.
- European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde is concerned about the lack of progress in the development of a "digital euro" to enable Europeans to continue to conduct e-commerce while distancing themselves from the American banking industry. The big barrier to this is a Spanish MEP, Fernando Navarrete Rojas of the centre-right European People's Party, who thinks that for a government to do this is an affront to the sanctity of the private sector and has been doing everything in his power to hold up the implementation bill for the currency. Not surprisingly, the big banks don't like it either, presumably because it would also enable Europeans to cut them out of the loop along with their American counterparts.
- A ban on the use of cellphones by students in New York City schools has been getting very good reviews, but it has revealed the rather awkward fact that many students don't know how to read an analogue clock. This isn't really a new phenomenon, of course; I heard anecdotes about that some 25 years ago, but I guess the fact that everyone had a digital clock in their pocket has masked that until now.
- Police in Heber City, Utah were caught in the awkward situation of having to explain why a report written with AI-driven report-writing software stated that an officer had been polymorphed into a frog. The cops believe that the situation arose when their bodycams, which apparently fed data directly into the software, picked up part of the film The Princess and the Frog playing in the background at a location they attended.
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